We present new techniques for reducing a multivariate sparse polynomial to a
univariate polynomial. The reduction works similarly to the classical and
widely-used Kronecker substitution, except that we choose the degrees randomly
based on the number of nonzero terms in the multivariate polynomial, that is,
its sparsity. The resulting univariate polynomial often has a significantly
lower degree than the Kronecker substitution polynomial, at the expense of a
small number of term collisions. As an application, we give a new algorithm for
multivariate interpolation which uses these new techniques along with any
existing univariate interpolation algorithm.Comment: 21 pages, 2 tables, 1 procedure. Accepted to ISSAC 201